The sounds of those distant dynasties are no longer extant in one language in Chinese, or any other sino-xenic language which adopted Chinese. One can only say that from the most consitent early systemisation of sounds, such as Qieyun in AD 601, that elements of sintial sounds, medials, vowels, endings and tones survive in modern sounds of modern dialects. As there are no recordings of speech in Chinese from the late Qing to the earliest dynasties, all he have to go on is the written texts in poetical works to guess, -that right, "guess" - the sounds which may have existed then.

AlexNg wrote:I heard that min branch off from ancient chinese and the others branch off from middle chinese ? What does it mean ?

This is a difficult question as it isn't an area that I've read up on much. However, many Min dialects does not seem to obey certain sound changes by comparing them to Qieyun and Guangyun rime books. All the other dialects seem to be able to, except Min. Min dialectologists have found the existence of syllabic prefixes surviving in modern Min dialects, and this has been theorised as being an element of Old Chinese as a grammatical indicator of word usage. See Laurant Sagart - Roots of Old Chinese. These are said to date to Western Zhou or earlier.

AlexNg wrote:Which language has the richest sounds. Personally, I think that mandarin is a very weak language due to its lack of p, t, k endings. Of course, it has the r sound at the beginning which other chinese language doesn't have.

AlexNg wrote:There are many Mandarin dialects, some of which retain the Ru tone. The Beijing dialect being prestigious on account of it being the capital is unfortunate to have lost its endings as early as the Yuan Dynasty. Other than Min, the Wu dialects retain features of voiced initials, rich variety of vowels, rich variety in endings, and retain all the four main tones.

What about vietnamese sounds ?

Vietnamese has a rich vowel set, and includes a fairly rich initial set. It also has medials too, and maintain MC endings.

Vietnamese has preserved sounds from pre-Middle Chinese, and Middle Chinese. The evidence of the the former can be found just by analysing the readings of characters. Take a list of characters from Middle Chinese rime books. Compare the readings of these characters modern SV and sort them by tone. You'll find that there are characters which unexpectedly populate the wrong tone categories, and some of these may be remanants of pre-MC readings.

>If you don't count the "ru" tone, then cantonese has only 6, the same as
north vietnamese ! If you count the "ru" tone then cantonese has 9 and vietnamese has 8.
<I wonder how you call those 3 ru tones.

>Vietnamese has a rich vowel set, and includes a fairly rich initial set. It also has medials too, and maintain MC endings.

<I know that there are 12 vowels in Vietnamese but there are 2 that are only long vowels, so it would be only 10 kinds of vowel. I don't know which ones are long.

Medials? Where is it? "Nh"? "Tr" ? Actually "Nh" is "Ny" and "Tr" is read as retroflex rather than cluster. If you say that years ago it was a cluster with -r- medial, it has already expired.
Now Vietnamese has 3 retroflexes, "tr" "s" (it's written as "s" but read as "sh") and "r" but "s" and "r" are failing in the Hanoi dialect ([?] I'm not sure about this, but there is in a dialect) and is read as "s" and "z". This retroflex-"z" should be very similar to Mandarin "r", but Central/Southern Vietnamese read is retroflex-"y" (the same[?] as English)
I don't know Vietnamese dialects well, but I can use the table of consonants from Mark Alves' paper A_look_at_northcentral_Vietnamese

>Vietnamese has preserved sounds from pre-Middle Chinese, and Middle Chinese. The evidence of the the former can be found just by analysing the readings of characters. Take a list of characters from Middle Chinese rime books. Compare the readings of these characters modern SV and sort them by tone. You'll find that there are characters which unexpectedly populate the wrong tone categories, and some of these may be remanants of pre-MC readings.

>It's true that among SV readings there are some chars that do not obey MC reading.
For Example:
Some of the earth branch/heaven stem has preserved older form of Chinese.

From comparisons of Old Sino-Viet and New Sino-Viet we can make a model of Chinese tonogenesis. The trouble is at double-endings, the tone category could become different.

[Sorry A strange error happens but I don't know why, so I removed Vietnamese and Chinese letters from this post]

>If you don't count the "ru" tone, then cantonese has only 6, the same as
north vietnamese ! If you count the "ru" tone then cantonese has 9 and vietnamese has 8.
<I wonder how you call those 3 ru tones.

>Vietnamese has a rich vowel set, and includes a fairly rich initial set. It also has medials too, and maintain MC endings.

<I know that there are 12 vowels in Vietnamese but there are 2 that are only long vowels, so it would be only 10 kinds of vowel. I don't know which ones are long.

Medials? Where is it? "Nh"? "Tr" ? Actually "Nh" is "Ny" and "Tr" is read as retroflex rather than cluster. If you say that years ago it was a cluster with -r- medial, it has already expired.
Now Vietnamese has 3 retroflexes, "tr" "s" (it's written as "s" but read as "sh") and "r" but "s" and "r" are failing in the Hanoi dialect ([?] I'm not sure about this, but there is in a dialect) and is read as "s" and "z". This retroflex-"z" should be very similar to Mandarin "r", but Central/Southern Vietnamese read is retroflex-"y" (the same[?] as English)
I don't know Vietnamese dialects well, but I can use the table of consonants from Mark Alves' paper A_look_at_northcentral_Vietnamese

>Vietnamese has preserved sounds from pre-Middle Chinese, and Middle Chinese. The evidence of the the former can be found just by analysing the readings of characters. Take a list of characters from Middle Chinese rime books. Compare the readings of these characters modern SV and sort them by tone. You'll find that there are characters which unexpectedly populate the wrong tone categories, and some of these may be remanants of pre-MC readings.

>It's true that among SV readings there are some chars that do not obey MC reading.
For Example:
Some of the earth branch/heaven stem has preserved older form of Chinese.

From comparisons of Old Sino-Viet and New Sino-Viet we can make a model of Chinese tonogenesis. The trouble is at double-endings, the tone category could become different.

[Sorry A strange error happens but I don't know why, so I removed Vietnamese and Chinese letters from this post]

For the site's uncertainty to your statement of certainty seems to me your wishful thinking at making the link as solid as possible is obscuring your objectivity.

And the contents of the second link you've provided are exactly the same as the one before it. At least you've realised it 'implies' rather than stating unequivocally that there is any link between Vietnamese and Sino Tibetan, despite the 'possibly' mentioned.

It still does not explain why adjectives in Vietnamese occur after the noun it describes, contrary to Sino-Tibetan languages, for instance. Such a basic feature of grammar is not borrowed, and this poses one of the big obstacles for you to demonstrate the linkage.

If the adjectives comes after the noun doesn't imply that it belongs to another language family.

Take for example, the latin languages such as french, the adjectives is after the noun but it still belongs to the same language family ie. indo-european as the germanic languages such as english which has the adjectives before the noun.

We must look at the common characteristics of the language family eg.
tonal, mono-syllabic etc that I listed out in part 1 and is listed out in the new url in this thread.

In tai languages, the adjectives is after the noun, I guess that is why vietnamese is placed under this subgroup.

AlexNg wrote:If the adjectives comes after the noun doesn't imply that it belongs to another language family.

Take for example, the latin languages such as french, the adjectives is after the noun but it still belongs to the same language family ie. indo-european as the germanic languages such as english which has the adjectives before the noun.

We must look at the common characteristics of the language family eg.tonal, mono-syllabic etc that I listed out in part 1 and is listed out in the new url in this thread.

In tai languages, the adjectives is after the noun, I guess that is why vietnamese is placed under this subgroup.

Latin, French, or German is irrelevant, since they are all languages which has verb conjugation - something which Chinese doesn't have, and Latin and German has noun declensions, again something Chinese doesn't have. In latin, the adjectives also change - something that Chinese doesn't do.

Common characteristics only go so far. It is the exceptions which help determine if there are reasons why Vietnamese and Chinese should be classified as having separate ancestral and linguistical heritages, before they came into contact. And the links given earlier in the first thread I provided are reason why more modern linguists do not believe Vietnamese is a Thai relative.

You should re-examine the way you interpret "possibly" in the original article to which you use the word "imply" and then to your interpretation that Vietnamese is a Tai language.

I can only say it is wishful thinking on your part to equate what was in the article to your final conclusion.

Your argument is irrelevant. I never said that latin and germanic languages belong to sino-tibetan language family, did I ? I did say that germanic and latin languages fall under the indo-european language family

Somebody was arguing that if the adjectives come after the noun, it cannot be under the same family tree !

That is why I quoted that latin language such as french which has the adjectives after the noun do belong to the same family tree as english !

Anyway, tai language has the adjectives after the noun, and some linguist do place it under the same family tree due to their common characteristics.

Thai people came very late(around 5th-9th centuries ) from yunnan to the place there stayed now.That place is belonged to Mon people .So we can say maybe mon language has some words share with vietnam rather than tai language.
There are no less than 5 millions Mon people now in Thailand and myanmar.

ongtk wrote:Thai people came very late(around 5th-9th centuries ) from yunnan to the place there stayed now.That place is belonged to Mon people .So we can say maybe mon language has some words share with vietnam rather than tai language.There are no less than 5 millions Mon people now in Thailand and myanmar.

What are you going to say? If You say "Thai" it's around 12 (I'm not really sure about this. "Tai" refers to different group from Thai. Does "maybe mon language has some words share with vietnam rather than tai language." mean that "it's the contact relationship that make Vietnamese share some word with Mon rather than does Tai."?